Nothing Compares 2 U
Of contrasts and juxtapositions and weird, weird pairs.
One brief musing about storytelling per day (or, more likely, as frequently as I can muster).
March 3, 2026
YEARS AGO, traveling through the South, I happened upon a small town called Bruceton, TN. As my traveling companion and I passed through, we encountered a sign that immediately etched itself into my brain indelibly and remains with me today. As I have done with countless signs across the miles and years, I photographed it.
What appealed to me so much about this sign? At the time, I thought it was just plain weird and fun. But it contains something more meaningful, in kind of a classic rhetorical sense: the contrast between the vast, sprawling, existential statement that “God is love” and the very real, visceral, Friday-night-lights summoning of scholastic sports that says “Go Mustangs.” The elegantly eternal and the aggressively municipal, right there next to each other.
On that same trip, down the road a couple hundred miles in Vicksburg, MS, I found another perfect and self-contained unlikely juxtaposition — this one a commentary on the absurdity of American history.
After a time, I became attuned to noticing these side-by-side tiny stories in the landscape and in popular culture.
One day, I watched an old episode of “Cheers” in which the gang at the bar were watching a Hollywood awards ceremony that kept pairing unlikely presenters to give out accolades — and so the camera could cut to Sam and Rebecca and Cliff and Norm making weird faces. The one that stuck in my mind (possibly quite incorrectly):
“And now, giving the award for best sound design in a short documentary — Sharon Stone … and the Dalai Lama.”
Then there was the Exxon station not far from the University of Pittsburgh campus in Summer 2003, in the patriotism-swollen months after the United States ejected Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq:
FREEDOM LIVES
HIRING CASHIER
Then there’s what may be my all-time favorite from “The Simpsons,” which is undermined only by the fact that it’s fictional rather than vernacular:
Why are these funny and even, on occasion, impactful? How do they cut through the static? Because they’re defiance in miniature. They play to our longtime expectations and turn them upside down.
We typically gravitate toward things that go together without considering the absurdity — comic or cultural — in the things that don’t. In stories, that’s a tiny way to get people to take notice, whether you make it up in your fictional work or — even better — discover it in your reporting out there in the real world.
And now, Sinead O’Connor.
To Ponder
What odd pairs have you encountered that stick in your memory?
Can you see ways this might be used in storytelling to further a narrative you’re building?
Do you photograph signs? If you do, which ones attract you and why?
Another example of how many things can hold space in our minds at a single moment. Thanks Ted for pointing out what is often disregarded, dismissed, or (alas) even disparaged in the world of human oddities. I can imagine in an alternate universe you are on the writing staff of The Simpsons, constantly pointing out the marvels of the universe. Party on Dude!